“A man who wants to mutilate himself is certainly damned, isn’t he?”

Idle youth, enslaved to everything; by being too sensitive I have wasted my life.

I am the slave of my baptism. Parents, you have caused my misfortune, and you have caused your own.

Eternity. It is the sea mingled with the sun.

Genius is the recovery of childhood at will.

Yet this is the watch by night. Let us all accept new strength, and real tenderness. And at dawn, armed with glowing patience, we will enter the cities of glory.

Life is the farce which everyone has to perform.

It is wrong to say: I think. One ought to say: I am thought. I is someone else.

Oh! If only we were naked now, and free to watch our protruding parts align; To whisper – both of us – in ecstasy!

Romanticism has never been properly judged. Who was there to judge it? The critics!

In the great glasshouses streaming with condensation, the children in mourning-dress beheld marvels.

Morality is the weakness of the mind.

True alchemy lies in this formula: ‘Your memory and your senses are but the nourishment of your creative impulse’.

It began as research. I wrote of silences, of nights, I scribbled the indescribable. I tied down the vertigo.

And from that time on I bathed in the Poem Of the Sea, star-infused and churned into milk, Devouring the green azures; where, entranced in pallid flotsam, A dreaming drowned man sometimes goes down.

What a life! True life is elsewhere. We are not in the world.

I understand, and not knowing how to express myself without pagan words, I’d rather remain silent.

Live your own destiny imperfectly than to live an imitation of somebody.

It is better to live your own destiny imperfectly than to live an imitation of somebody else’s life with perfection.

When people are free to do as they please, they usually imitate each other.

Rudeness is a weak imitation of strength.

Take man’s most fantastic invention- God. Man invents God in the image of his longings, in the image of what he wants to be, then proceeds to imitate that image, vie with it, and strive to overcome it.

The great strength of the totalitarian state is that it forces those who fear it to imitate it.

The eight laws of learning are explanation, demonstration, imitation, repetition, repetition, repetition, repetition, repetition.

To refrain from imitation is the best revenge.